The embodiments relate, in general, to medical procedures and devices to enter into a patient's body cavity and, more particularly, to devices for establishing at least one conduit into a patient's body cavity through a patient's orifice, such as a patient's vagina, to accomplish various surgical and therapeutic procedures.
Access to the abdominal cavity may, from time to time, be required for diagnostic and therapeutic endeavors for a variety of medical and surgical diseases. Historically, abdominal access has required a formal laparotomy to provide adequate exposure. Such procedures, which require incisions to be made in the abdomen, are not particularly well-suited for patients that may have extensive abdominal scarring from previous procedures, those persons who are morbidly obese, those individuals with abdominal wall infection, and those patients with diminished abdominal wall integrity, such as patients with burns and skin grafting. Other patients simply do not want to have a scar if it can be avoided.
Minimally invasive procedures are desirable because such procedures can reduce pain and provide relatively quick recovery times as compared with conventional open medical procedures. Many minimally invasive procedures are performed with an endoscope (including, without limitation, laparoscopes). Such procedures permit a physician to position, manipulate, and view medical instruments and accessories inside the patient through a small access opening in the patient's body. Laparoscopy is a term used to describe such an “endosurgical” approach using an endoscope (often a rigid laparoscope). In this type of procedure, accessory devices are often inserted into a patient through trocars placed through the body wall. Trocars must typically pass through several layers of overlapping tissue/muscle before reaching the abdominal cavity.
Still less invasive treatments include those that are performed through insertion of an endoscope through a natural body orifice to a treatment region. Examples of this approach include, but are not limited to, cholecystectomy, appendectomy, cystoscopy, hysteroscopy, esophagogastroduodenoscopy, and colonoscopy. Many of these procedures employ the use of a flexible endoscope during the procedure. Flexible endoscopes often have a flexible, steerable articulating section near the distal end that can be controlled by the user by utilizing controls at the proximal end. Minimally invasive therapeutic procedures to treat diseased tissue by introducing medical instruments to a tissue treatment region through a natural opening of the patient are known as Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES)™. Entry through a natural opening, such as a patient's vagina, for example may further reduce the pain a patient experiences after the procedure because the vaginal walls have less pain receptors than do the abdominal walls.
Some flexible endoscopes are relatively small (about 1 mm to 3 mm in diameter), and may have no integral accessory channel (also called biopsy channels or working channels). Other flexible endoscopes, including gastroscopes and colonoscopes, have integral working channels having a diameter of about 2.0 mm to 3.5 mm for the purpose of introducing and removing medical devices and other accessory devices to perform diagnosis or therapy within the patient. As a result, the accessory devices used by a physician can be limited in size by the diameter of the accessory channel of the scope used. Additionally, the physician may be limited to a single accessory device when using the standard endoscope having one working channel.
Certain specialized endoscopes are available, such as large working channel endoscopes having a working channel of about 5-10 mm in diameter, which can be used to pass relatively large accessories, or to provide capability to suction large blood clots. Other specialized endoscopes include those having two or more working channels. Regardless, using an endoscope alone to perform a surgical procedure may be limiting in that multiple tools may not be easily moved apart from one another to perform a surgical procedure.
The above mentioned minimally invasive surgical procedures have changed some of the major open surgical procedures such as gall bladder removal, or a cholecystectomy, to simple outpatient surgery. Consequently, the patient's return to normal activity has changed from weeks to days. These types of surgeries are often used for repairing defects or for the removal of diseased tissue or organs from areas of the body such as the abdominal cavity.
The foregoing discussion is intended only to illustrate the present field and should not be taken as a disavowal of claim scope.